Preschool children say a prayer before lunch on Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2023, at the iKids Childhood Enrichment Center in Benton, Kentucky. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Abbey Cutrer)

A bill that encourages local governments to examine available zoning for child care centers in Kentucky passed out of a House committee Thursday 12-2 with one pass.?

House Bill 561 sponsor Rep. Samara Heavrin, R-Leitchfield, said her bill encourages local officials to “??make sure there’s not any regulation preventing childcare centers from opening in their local counties or cities.”?

“While we’re looking at steps to help child care in Kentucky, this is the number one thing that we need to start working on,” said Heavrin, who chairs the House Families and Children Committee, whose members passed HB561 after half an hour of discussion.?

Charles Aull, executive director of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce Center for Policy and Research, said zoning issues come up a lot for businesses that may want to add child care services for their employees. And this bill, he said, would simplify the process for them.?

“One of the things we’ve discovered in talking with a lot of early childhood education providers and childcare service providers is that land use rules and zoning regulations can often create inadvertent barriers, oftentimes, to the availability of childcare services,” Aull said.??

“That’s something they have to look at very closely to determine, ‘Okay, we would love to have an on-site facility but can we even do that in the first place? And what are the rules? How do we navigate this?’ ” Aull told committee members. “And when you run into rules … it can create a lot of reasons to say no. It can create a lot of reasons not to do something if it becomes excessively complicated.”

Heavrin’s House Concurrent Resolution 43 also passed out of the committee, which proposes to re-establish the Early Childhood Education Task Force this year and have its members submit findings by Dec. 1.?

These measures come as the child care industry — which some are working to rebrand under an “early childhood education” umbrella — is a major theme in the 2024 legislative session.?

As the Lantern has reported, federal COVID-19 dollars that helped stabilize the industry during the last few years are running out. This leaves centers to cut pay for their workers, raise tuition for parents and even close.?

Kentucky could lose more than a fifth of its child care providers if the state doesn’t help. And even with the state help that is proposed in the House budget – a $52 million a year increase – experts say about 16,000 kids could lose access to child care in 2024.?

Meanwhile, West Kentucky Republican Sen. Danny Carroll has pitched a $300 million, two-year bill to stabilize and expand early childhood education, which child care experts in the state have widely praised.

Heavrin’s HB561 also proposes removing the word “pilot” from the Employee Child-Care Assistance Partnership program, enacted into law in 2022. The law incentivized employers to help employees pay for child care. Advocates have said it is a good start, but it’s also new and has low participation.?

It’s a “remarkably new and innovative program,” Aull said.

However, “Employers tend to be very cautious when it comes to changing benefit packages,” he said. “They want to study this program. They want to learn about it. They want to understand how this works and how it would intersect with their broader benefit packages. They’re not going to make that decision in six months. They’re going to make it over the span of a couple of years and so having this program continue to exist will give them that runway to learn about it.”?